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Insurgent gardens should stand up against advertising billboards. The city of spectacle finds its most literal expression in these urban signs, and a rebellious landscape should choose them as their Place Vendôme Column: the symbol to tear down. Where there was a billboard, a vertical garden; against the screams of advertising, the whispers of vegetation. A more silent town is a more inhabitable one: if we confront atmospheric, acoustic and luminous pollution, no less should we oppose the visual contamination of the city caused by the frenzy of commercial or political advertising. In the past institutions were represented through architecture and landscape; today they are represented through advertisements: our billboards are our Versailles. Their elimination is a modest and attainable goal: a law made them disappear from roads, and another can erradicate them from streets. With some exceptions indeed; the Osborne bull has urban correlates in some neon crossroads and movie billboards, but the fascination with the Venturi of “Main Street is almost all right” should not make one think that “Las Vegas is almost all right.” Times Square has served as an excuse for the colonization of the city by publicity which in most cases degrades the urban landscape. Let us plant ivy at the foot of every billboard and let us raise insurgent gardens: ‘Erased billboards,’ a civic and artistic project in the spirit of the Beuys of Kassel. Let nature win over spectacle, and let Barcelona, pioneer in so many things, move from hard squares to soft billboards.
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